


A Light On a Hill

by rubblerousing



Category: Panic At The Disco
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-21
Updated: 2008-08-21
Packaged: 2017-11-03 17:42:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 17,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/384141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rubblerousing/pseuds/rubblerousing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My greatest flaw is that I keep a running list of eight separate sentences that I, at one point in my life, have spoken aloud and which could have, maybe, possibly, embodied within them the reason Ryan Ross has decided to hate me. Some people’s greatest flaws are their overly prominent features. Some people would tell me my greatest flaw should be my overly prominent features. My friends would say my greatest flaw is that I am too outspoken; people who are under the delusion they are my friends but in actuality are not would say my greatest flaw is that I am too reserved. Maybe it’s the other way around. If I were a better person and could admit I probably very dearly ought to be under the watchful eye of a psychiatrist, because I have some kind of obsession with thinking about things too much, and with keeping lists, then my psychiatrist would say my greatest flaws are cowardice, being unable to move on from the past, an addiction to adulation, keeping lists, and perhaps Ryan Ross, if I ever got around to mentioning him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. “My name is Brendon Urie, I know where you live.”

My greatest flaw is that I keep a running list of eight separate sentences that I, at one point in my life, have spoken aloud and which could have, maybe, possibly, embodied within them the reason Ryan Ross has decided to hate me. Some people’s greatest flaws are their overly prominent features. Some people would tell me my greatest flaw should be my overly prominent features. My friends would say my greatest flaw is that I am too outspoken; people who are under the delusion they are my friends but in actuality are not would say my greatest flaw is that I am too reserved. Maybe it’s the other way around. If I were a better person and could admit I probably very dearly ought to be under the watchful eye of a psychiatrist, because I have some kind of obsession with thinking about things too much, and with keeping lists, then my psychiatrist would say my greatest flaws are cowardice, being unable to move on from the past, an addiction to adulation, keeping lists, and perhaps Ryan Ross, if I ever got around to mentioning him. Regrettably, my psychiatrist is imaginary.

It isn’t as though I am incapable of telling stories not about Ryan Ross. After all, I have lived more years not knowing him than I have lived knowing him. It’s not like my life started when I first laid eyes on him. And I’ve experienced plenty of times - weeks, days, events, occurrences, incidents, without Ryan being there with me. I have lived a larger life than most people my age, I could talk about places I’ve seen, girls I’ve met, ridiculous things I’ve eaten, the fetid things I’ve found underneath hotel beds that Ryan wasn’t sleeping in. I just so happen to have a story about Ryan that is superlative of all the stories I harbor within me. And I do harbor it the best. It ought to be told before it begins to collect dust.

Throughout the majority of sentences on my list, as they occurred, I kept them fresh and alive in my head. I did not write them down on paper until number five. I left enough room on the page for several more to come in the future; I am humble enough to know that I will never stop making mistakes. When number five came out of my mouth, I knew it was fated to go on the list, and then eight showed up, and then I set the piece of paper on fire on the side of the road somewhere in Colorado with a royal blue colored Bic lighter when a tire on our bus blew out and it was possible we all could have died. Whether or not I rewrite it, or start a whole new list in the future, is irrelevant. Even if I don't, the last one will never leave my mind. I am lamenting its physical counterpart, bidding it adieu, never to be spoken of again, if I should be so lucky. Which reminds me… dear imaginary psychiatrist, it has recently become apparent to me I may be a pyromaniac as well.

1\. “My name is Brendon Urie, I know where you live.”

My parents told me Todd Greenhorne was a bad influence on me and that I was no longer allowed to see him or to speak to him ever again. They told me this on a March evening, the day after I came home fifteen minutes past curfew, wearing Todd’s grey sweatshirt over my black t-shirt upon which was scrawled in white the name of the band we had just gone downtown to see. I was wearing his sweatshirt because, had my parents seen me in the t-shirt, I would have never seen the light of day again for all the grounding I would have been sure to receive. But I had been required to purchase it at the merchandise table at the show when a girl I would have only previously assumed was a prostitute accidentally spilled her cosmopolitan on my earlier, more proper shirt, the one that had actually come from my closet. If I had come home with my old shirt smelling of alcohol, I would have never seen anything again; they would have taken out my eyes.

Apparently wearing another boy’s sweatshirt “because I was cold” was a wildly homoerotic thing to do, because my parents became flustered at the mention of it; my father demanded: “take it off if it’s Todd’s!” which made very little sense, at the same time my mother pointed out: “you know people say his sister is a lesbian!” By these two statements I was expected to gather that wearing Todd Greenhorne’s grey sweatshirt in my family’s home was akin to fucking him in front of the mantel while my parents said grace before dinner. “Sorry,” I had told them. “I’ll return it to him tomorrow.”

“No you won’t!” said my mother, and, “we’ll talk about it in the morning.” We did talk about it in the morning, and that’s when they said I was not allowed to see him anymore, ever again. I saw him two hours later, while my father worked in the office in our basement and my mother went grocery shopping. Todd took me to a coffee shop near the strip called La Banlieue which I thought sounded cool at the time, but, now that I know marginally more French, I recognize as not a very cool name at all. Todd said its appeal was that it was “like Starbucks, but it isn’t Starbucks, and the college kids come here.”

Todd was quietly pointing out individual people and telling me their life stories. A girl at the counter just moved here from Wisconsin and wants to be a graphic designer; she was at some guy on a sofa’s most recent party and almost looked at Todd there. Twice. I was suffering through something mocha and wondering why Todd wanted to make friends with college kids when, if he were to be successful, they would most likely spend all of their time taunting him for not being in college. It was then when I quite inadvertently looked directly into the eyes of a person in the far booth at the third table ahead and to my right. Then I choked. It seems like something that would only happen in badly written comedies or even more terribly written romances – when you first look into the eyes of someone who will drastically change your life, God help you if you happen to be drinking something. Never failing to be the epitome of misfortune and disgrace, I was drinking something hot. And I wasn’t even in a movie.

I tried to play it off like I had asthma, or something, and soon enough people stopped staring at me. I looked back at the boy who had caused the problem in the first place, with the intent to glare at him, but he was looking at a blonde girl at his table and laughing politely at something she said. His eyebrows moved closer together so that he was laughing in an “I just cannot believe what you said was so hilarious” sort of way, and I instantly knew he was faking it. He was not amused. He was lying.

“Brendon?”

I snapped my attention back to Todd. “Yes?” I asked innocently.

Todd gave me a concerned, sympathetic look. “Are you okay?”

I nodded for an exceptionally long time before answering. “I’m fine.”

“Do you want to go sit at that table?” He pointed to the one nearest to the sofa. It was situated underneath a white plastic chandelier that looked like it came from Ikea and was possibly Las Vegas’ closest attempt at Rococo. “Jenna Verde and Will Garrett are totally dating now, but I could probably break them up. Allison, she’s next to Jenna, has a wicked crush on me, I think. And if she doesn’t, maybe Will could get us on the swim team, or something. You know he might go to the Olympics?”

“Isn’t he the one that almost drowned?” I asked, observing the back of his head.

Todd faltered. “Well yes, but that was just a fluke. He’s going all the way next year.”

“I don’t really want to go sit over there,” I said honestly, and Todd looked a little crestfallen. “Who is that?” I asked instead, pointing in the general direction without actually looking.

Todd craned his neck to stare and I kept my eyes on my cup and tried not to have second hand embarrassment in case he got caught. When he settled back into his seat, he answered in a question: “Ryan Ross?”

“Was I supposed to know that?” I asked.

“Well, he is in a band with Brent…” Todd looked like he felt bad for my idiocy.

I shook my head. “Brent who?”

“Brent Wilson, Brendon. He goes to our school? You have classes with him.”

“Oh,” I said. I had no idea.

“Ryan Ross is kind of weird. He lives all alone, you know, and he’s always writing shit down. I wonder sometimes if he’s a hermit.”

“He can’t be a hermit if he’s on a date at a coffee place right now,” I pointed out.

“He is not on a date,” Todd said knowingly. “Ryan Ross doesn’t date.”

I decided I did not want to know what he meant by that, so I gave him a look and let it go. Everyone dated. Everyone who was more fortunate than me, which was nearly every person on Earth, dated. I was only allowed to date girls pre-approved by my parents, and thus, I didn’t date. Ryan Ross had his own place, and a hairstyle; Ryan Ross fucking dated.

“He lives near you,” Todd continued. “He had a housewarming party three months ago. It’s in those apartments by the bowling alley and that abandoned motel.”

The motel was a stucco and terracotta monstrosity called the Cacti Inn. It had a neon cactus sign that never lit up anymore, but the top of which was barely visible through my bedroom window. Following my mocha I rushed home before anyone could notice I was gone, and sat in my room, pretending to be grounded, staring at that sign. Maybe I had choked on my drink because I thought he was a girl. Maybe I choked on it because I had a severe and unchecked social phobia that caused my throat to close up when I was subjected to eye contact. Clearly, being grounded would indirectly be the death of me. I wanted to get out of the house.

Sitting through dinner that evening was like sitting through torture. My legs refused to be still. I wanted to go for a walk, and I was pretty sure I knew where I wanted to walk to, but I didn’t want to think about why. I didn’t want to think about anything at all, in fact, but the nothing in my head was so loud that I scarcely heard what my family said throughout the meal. It was only through miraculous intrusion that I somehow knew when to mumble an acknowledging response.

When I had downed the last bit of mashed potato, I bolted back to my room. Before I left, I dove under my bed to retrieve last year’s yearbook. I flipped it open to my class, to the W’s, and, sure enough, pictured there was one Mr. Brent Wilson. “Nice fucking hair,” I told his photograph out loud, slammed the book shut, and jumped out the window.

Todd Greenhorne was not the key to my freedom. Just because I had never snuck out of the house to do anything without him before didn’t mean I relied on him. In fact, he was kind of a dick. He was extraordinarily less popular than he thought he was. He had to be; he was in the A/V club. But he was nice, and unafraid to meet new people like I usually was. He laughed at my jokes and didn’t seem to think I was as uninteresting as I knew I was. I hoped he wasn’t sitting somewhere with Ryan Ross just then, telling him he thought I might be a hermit. You could never tell with Todd just what he might say about you to other people. I tried to keep him at a distance for that, but he was really my only friend at school. I had other friends from other places, like the religious summer camp I had gone to for five years, and church, and the religious after school program I used to attend, and… the church one county over who we sometimes merged with to have bigger bake sales. But hanging out with overtly religious people sometimes made me uncomfortable and wish I was with Todd.

During my walk I tried to think about my future. I wondered if I would become someone who was disassociated from religion because one had been pushed on me during my youth. Plenty of people turned out that way. And I wondered if I would ever live alone. I was under the impression that I was expected to live at home with my parents until I was married, but they never explicitly told me any such thing, so I wondered where I even got that idea. I would be graduating high school soon enough, I would be legally allowed to get my own place. I had never thought about it before that night, and while I looked longingly at Ryan Ross’ apartment complex, it was for myself, and not for him.

He wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t going to be there, what kind of person stands outside of their own apartment complex for no reason? And even if he had been there, I never would have plucked up the courage to speak to him. I would have hid behind something and spied on him until it occurred to me I was being a stalker, and then I would have trudged home to wallow in my sorrow. I turned on my heel and headed in the opposite direction. The neon signs of fast food restaurants lay ahead and I entertained the idea of an ice cream cone until I remembered I didn’t have any money on me.

I was four blocks away from the bowling alley, the motel, and Ryan’s apartments when several things happened at once. I’m not sure if I noticed the car or the cat first, but all of a sudden, I was nearly hit by a swerving car, and when I tried to jump out of the way, I nearly landed on top of a stray cat. The car came to a screeching halt, with both right tires on the sidewalk I had been trying to make use of, and the cat yelped at me and tried to bat at my leg with its claws. The passenger door of the car opened and the first thing that came out of it was words: “I am not drunk!” someone yelled, possibly at me, and they yelled it in a manner that told me exactly the opposite was true.

But I was uninterested in drunk drivers, and more worried about the poor cat. I always had an affinity for animals, and I tried to coax it out of the shadows and to let me pet it.

“Do you know who’s fucking calling me right now?” asked another voice, presumably not directed at me. Then that same person let out a string of curse words that lasted about forty-five seconds and started out loud but ended in a mumble before he said, “Hello?”

I turned around with the cat in my arms. She was black and had yellow eyes and I wondered if I could convince my parents to keep her, although explaining how I found a cat while sitting in my room was beyond me.

“Yeah, hang on a minute, would you?” said the passenger of the car, who was standing on the sidewalk with his back to me, a cell phone to his ear, with the car door still open. He leaned down to look at the driver, who peered up at him. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I’ll call you later,” the driver said, but the passenger waved him off, seeming annoyed by the idea, and slammed the door shut. The car sped off, leaving tire tracks in the grass before making it back onto the street, and then Ryan Ross was stumbling down the sidewalk, on the phone, headed in my general direction. I knew it was him before he turned around, but that was about all that I knew. Anything else, like I should run away before he caught me looking at his apartments, or that I even had the capacity to move, had completely escaped my knowledge.

“I don’t know where she is, maybe she’s in Maui. She said something about Hawaii.” He giggled, apparently at what had just come out of his mouth, and weaved back and forth, sometimes going forward and sometimes going backward, and not really making it anywhere. “Maybe you should go look for her there.” He paused, listening to a response on the other end, and when his smile fell I shifted my eyes to the side and tried to scope my exit. He apparently hadn’t noticed me standing there yet, and I couldn’t decide if leaving would make me more noticeable or not. It didn’t help I was holding a cat.

“Look, I don’t know, and I don’t know what makes you think she would have told me anyway.” Another pause. I took a tentative step to the right. His whole body turned toward me at my tiny movement, and he looked right at me, stared into my eyes, his mouth agape, his eyebrows set in confusion. “No, I’m not drunk,” he said. It appeared he was telling me, but I knew he wasn’t. “Stop fucking calling me.”

A normal person would have hung up then, but he made no such move. Instead, he put his hand over the receiver and actually spoke to me in a whisper. “Put the cat down,” he demanded.

Without thinking about it twice, I let the cat go, and it ran away. “I, um, I live nearby, and I was just…” I tried to explain to him, but stopped when he forcefully grabbed my right arm and hooked his left arm through it, and began walking us both in the direction from which I’d come.

“You were in the coffee place, weren’t you?” he whispered to me, and before I could answer, brought the phone back to his mouth and yelled into it. “I didn’t even put those boxes there, I took everything of mine already. There’s no way I’m going back to sift through shit that isn’t mine.”

He leaned against me and eventually his arm went from being hooked in mine to being clasped around my waist. I feared if I took one misstep he would end up on the cement on his face. “Um,” I said after a while, “my name is Brendon Urie.”

“Ryan,” he said back.

“Hi, Ryan,” I told him, and was unable to conceal the grin just saying it elicited.

“Just help me walk home, will you?” he asked. “I live up-“

“I know where you live,” I blurted out, because it was true, and because I am an idiot. “I mean…” I stammered when he looked at me, confused all over again. “My friend said he was at your party…”

He frowned into the phone again. “I was not at a party! It’s goddamn nine o’clock at night or something, who gets drunk at nine o’clock? And it’s a Thursday!”

I felt bad for possibly getting him in trouble with someone, and it was a Wednesday, but I decided not to tell him that.

He rolled his eyes. “Whatever, so it’s a Wednesday. I have classes tomorrow, I am not drunk.” With that, he finally hung up, and threw his phone in a hedge protecting the apartment complex. He smiled at me. “That takes care of that.”

We had made it to the main door of his building. “Um, can you make it up the stairs? Should I…”

He shook his head. “I’ll take the elevator.” He untangled himself from me and stumbled toward the door, waving one hand above his head without looking back at me. “Thanks, Brandon.”

“It’s Brendon,” I said when he was out of earshot, and then I went to rescue his phone. I took it home with me. I turned all the lights out in my room and sat under the blankets and sheets of my bed with it, flipping through all of his text messages first and all of his contacts second. Brent Wilson was in there; Todd Greenhorne was not. I put my name and number into it, and resolved to bring it back to him the next day.

It could be that he already hated me, even then.


	2. “I can sing, I am remarkably good at singing, you kind of look like you need to sit down.”

My favorite thing in the world has always been music. I devoted a great deal of my life to learning how to play several instruments. As far as singing goes, I was never taught how to do it, but I was never afraid to sing. I never cared if my voice was bad or good; it was a voice, and that’s all you need. Plenty of people I am too polite to name have become wildly famous and rich, living off making music and singing with their terrible voices. It’s all about what you’re singing, and not how you sing it. I don’t know how I was so lucky as to have this blind faith in myself, but it was always there, musically, anyway. Nonetheless, I never really planned on being a professional musician. In order to do that, you have to have a lot of friends already in the business, and I only had one acquaintance in a band that apparently had never even played a show. I knew this because I told Todd we should definitely go to Ryan and Brent’s band’s next gig, and Todd said, “What gig? They just sit in the basement and write and record and never let anyone hear it.” As I said, I was no professional, but I knew this was not how you go about being a successful musician.

I started paying attention to Brent in school. We had a music class together, and apparently my attention paid to him resulted in his paying attention to me. He started talking to me, and I don’t know how much I actually liked him, but I pretended to like him, because I was still having an unreasonable infatuation with Ryan Ross. It wasn’t a weird infatuation, I hoped, but he just seemed profoundly more interesting than anyone I had ever known before, and I wanted to get to know him. I imagined Ryan being my new Todd, only better. We could be like those fabled best friends I’d heard so much about. We could get drunk and drive over people on the sidewalks and laugh about it together. I hated whoever was in the car with him that night, because he knew Ryan better than I did, and I hated Brent too, for exactly the same reason. But Brent was a way in. He was the only opportunity I had.

I tried to talk to him about his band as often as possible, but he wouldn’t say too much about it. He said Ryan liked to write everything, and sometimes this bothered him. He said Ryan was the lead singer, and I never once questioned whether or not his singing voice was beautiful, because I already knew. He talked about their drummer, Spencer, and how they were thinking about adding another guitarist.

“Hmm,” I said to this while my heart nearly beat itself right out of my chest.

“Maybe I’ll put up an ad in the cafeteria,” he said.

“Well, I can play guitar… you know…” I said as dispassionately as I possibly could.

“We haven’t even decided if we’re going to, yet,” he responded immediately, like every person he’d recently seen had been begging him to let him join the band and it was getting awfully redundant and grated on his nerves.

“I’m just saying,” I shrugged.

“If we hold an audition,” said Brent, picking up his bag and slinging it over his shoulder, “you’ll be the first to know.”

I took this as an insult, but smiled at him anyway as he left the room. An audition! Ha! I would royally kick the ass of every miserable guy who even dare try to compete against me. I didn’t exactly want to be in a band; in fact, the thought of performing in front of an audience sent chills down my spine in a way murderers with chainsaws and spiders and rabid dogs and heights did not, but luckily, they seemed like a band that was going nowhere and didn’t try very hard. And besides, Ryan was in it. People are great friends with their band members, are they not? Bands are practically fraternities, you read about it in Rolling Stone all the time. They get together in squalid rooms and maintain a diet of pure salt and sugar, and never sleep, and then they create together. They give birth to art. You can’t give birth to art with a bunch of dudes in a room and not be friends with them.

The next day, Brent tracked me down in the hall between classes and slapped a piece of pink, Kinko’s-copied paper into my hand. Apparently there was an audition.

I had three days before that dreaded Saturday night, and I spent all of my time, while not in school, looking at myself in the mirror. Not because I was so gloriously handsome, but because I was trying to convince myself of a few things. Most of all, that I could totally be in a band. I could be band guy. A guy in a band. I may not have the most stylish clothes, or the coolest hair, but I had talent, and the wild determination that comes with youth. Those other things come afterwards, when you have money and people caring more about your appearance than you do. I thought about going to La Banlieue in a few months with Ryan and Brent and Spencer, who I still had yet to meet, and Todd would watch us pass by, sitting with his new friend, the new me, and say “There goes Panic! at the Disco. I know them. Sort of.”

On Saturday night, on my way to Spencer’s house, or Spencer’s basement, to be precise, many things were at odds inside of me. I wondered if I would be good enough for them, but knew I would be better than everyone else. I wondered if I got in the band, if I should convince them to start playing shows and getting their name spread around, or if I should encourage them to stay in the shadows, so I could stay there with them. I wondered if I had dressed well enough, or if I had dressed too well and everyone would be significantly more casually dressed than I was. I wished I hadn’t eaten dinner and compromised the delicate balance of my digestive system. I hoped Ryan would be there and I hoped he wouldn’t. I thought about his cell phone.

It had been two months and four days since I had walked him home. It had been two months and three days since I had rushed back to his apartment building at the break of dawn, his phone in my hand, my number still programmed in it, my rambling heart refusing to be subdued. I sat on the steps and waited for him to appear for four hours. I had a lot of time, during those four hours, to contemplate what exactly I was doing there. I never really figured it out.

He had seemed a little surprised at my presence, but not as surprised as I had expected him to be. Apparently it was a regular occurrence for people to wait around for him to show up and then do him a wholly unselfish favor, to return to him things he carelessly tossed away in a fit of show, but that everyone knows he really needs. Like he figured I would be there with it. It should have pissed me off.

I was not upset that he never called me. Or sent me a text message. Even to thank me. Not at all.

By the time two months later had rolled around, and I was on my way to the audition in Spencer’s basement, I had come to the conclusion that he never found my name in his contacts. There were a lot of people in there, no doubt a few of them were people he met once, people he hated and pretended to like, people he made empty promises to and vowed to call them later, without ever intending to. Besides, he thought my name was Brandon. If he saw Brendon in there, he would think it was some idiot he met at school, or met at a party, and hadn’t gotten around to deleting yet.

My theory was quashed when I rang the doorbell attached to Spencer’s parent’s house. My guitar in its case felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, and I would have set it down for a moment, if I’d had a moment to think. The front door whipped open less than one second after I took my finger off the button, and Ryan was there, looking me in the eyes. Before I could even open my mouth to say hello, he spoke first. “Brendon’s here,” he called behind his shoulder unenthusiastically, and without even motioning me inside, he walked away.

I followed him through a kitchen/dining room combo, a section of a living room, through a door and down some stairs. There was one chair left unoccupied, which he claimed for himself, to leave me standing. That was all right, I didn’t mind feeling like I was on American Idol, or something. Brent sat next to Ryan, and the driver of the car that had nearly killed me sat next to him.

“You must be Spencer,” I said, and shook his hand.

“I must be,” he said happily. When he wasn’t drunk, he seemed nice. “You must be Brendon.”

Only two other people had shown up to the audition, and they were standing against the wall, farther into the room, talking to each other and looking nervous. I turned back and forth, between the group of hopefuls and the group of actuals, and wondered which one to include myself in. I knew which one I wanted to be in, but that was besides the point.

“Should I go and wait over there?” I pointed to the nerds in the corner. I directed my question at Spencer, because Ryan had his arms crossed across his stomach and his eyes closed like he was meditating, or sleeping, and Brent was busy doing something with his phone. Spencer had a pile of papers on his lap, which he was sifting through with serious concentration, and I didn’t know what kind of paperwork came with being in a tiny, crappy band, but it seemed professional of him. Like he was the only one who cared about the auditions, like he was the only one taking it seriously. For all I knew, it was his math homework, but I liked him for it anyway.

He looked up at me with a half smile and said, “it’s just my basement, there aren’t any rules. We’re waiting about five more minutes for anyone else to show up.”

I nodded and began to slowly wander away, feeling intimidated by always having to look down on them for lack of a place to sit, and felt thoroughly sorry for myself for my inevitable fate: having to mingle with the nerds. I tried to cheer myself up. At least I could size up my competition.

I had only made it a third of the way over to them before I changed my mind. And before I could completely think out my plan, I determinedly turned around, walked back to the band, and sat on the floor in front of Brent’s feet.

“So…” I said. I caught the last half of Ryan opening one eye halfway to peer down at me, and he put on a small smile. “Am I playing something I already know, or one of your songs?”

Spencer sighed at my question, and Brent rolled his eyes so that they landed on Ryan. Both of them looked at Ryan, who remained in his meditative state, and then they both looked back to me. “Apparently,” said Spencer with a little bit of snide, “you’re going to play something you already know. If we decide we want one of you in the band, I guess Ryan will put you through some sort of rigorous initiation system, that, only if you pass, will he then divulge his lyrics to you.”

“Well,” I paused, thinking about it. “I don’t have to know the lyrics, do I? I could just play the guitar part.” Before I had finished speaking, Spencer was shaking his head.

“No, no, because… what was it you said, Ryan?”

Ryan licked his lips and then answered the question easily, without opening his eyes. “They might guess the lyrics.”

“You might guess the lyrics,” said Spencer, who clearly hated this plan.

‘How would I guess the lyrics?’ was such an obvious question I didn’t even think to ask it. Ryan sighed and stood and stormed away, mumbling something about being hungry, and went upstairs. He came back a few minutes later with two glasses of water. I assumed he would give the second one to someone else, but he never did, he just set it aside to drink it after he was finished with the first one. No one else showed up for the audition.

I played last. The two guys before me each made a few, minuscule mistakes in their songs. One of them covered up for his mistakes nicely, and I wondered if the band would even notice he did it. Neither of them sang. Their songs were boring, and covers of already crappy bands. By the time it was my turn, I’d worked myself up into a nervous, hyperactive confidence. I stood before them and said, “whatever, I’m going to sing.”

My last note resonated through the air, and when it was almost completely gone, Ryan said, “I like Brendon.” Before that instant, I didn’t even know if he was still awake.

There was a beat. “I like Brendon, too,” said Brent a moment later.

“Yeah, Brendon, why are you such a good singer?” asked Spencer.

“I – I’m not really,” I stammered humbly. “I sound like a, like an old man at church.”

“Yeah, Brendon won,” Ryan said.

I looked around. “I won? I didn’t know… I mean I knew it was a contest, but I…” The other two guys began to glumly pack up their guitars and go back upstairs, to leave.

“Um…” I said, and with it tried to communicate I thought the three of them should get together and more seriously think their decision through. I didn’t want anyone to feel bad. And I couldn’t believe it was over, just like that.

“We should celebrate,” Ryan stated, and followed the rejected boys up the stairs. When he came back down again, ten minutes later, about thirty people followed him. He also had several packages of snack food in his arms, and a bottle of wine held by the neck between two fingers.

“Your parents don’t mind if we drink this, right Spencer?” Ryan dumped everything onto a card table Brent set up. Loud music suddenly filled the room and girls who were so far out of my league, it was not even funny, began to dance around me.

“Did it have a silver ribbon around it?” Spencer yelled over the noise. “’Cause that’s for their anniversary!”

“Nope,” Ryan said simply, and I wondered if he was lying. He appointed himself honorary bartender and poured glasses for everyone. It was not lost on me that he gave me the first one.

It was technically the first party I had ever been to. It was certainly the first party that had ever been thrown in my honor and did not also take place at Chuck E. Cheese. I was not about to inform anybody of either of these facts. I played it cool and pretended to know exactly what I was doing. I drank the wine, and later, I drank the beer that had somehow appeared when the wine was gone. I talked to people. Very few of them had any idea I had just been admitted into the band, but, when I told them, everyone seemed happy for me. I was happy for myself. Everything had worked out perfectly, exactly the way I had predicted. It was almost too easy, I decided. The only hitch was that I had to watch Ryan flit about the room, that he wasn’t next to me.

That ended quickly enough. He didn’t stand next to me so much as he fell on top of me, but it worked. He covered the fall by giving me a hug, and I helped him back upright. “Brendon,” he said seriously and quietly and close to my face so I could hear him. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Have you?” I asked.

“I think you should be the singer,” he whispered into my ear, like no one else deserved to hear the stunning development occurring in his brain.

Wait a minute, said my mind. “Wait a minute,” I said to him. That was definitely not part of the plan. It figured karma would have something to do with it, that everything had thus far gone so easily because Ryan was just waiting on the sidelines to single handedly ruin everything. “What do you mean, I should be the singer?”

“I don’t think about things like you think about things, I think about things in a different light.” Ryan said this so it all sounded like one word. “I have to think about what’s best for my music, even if it means personal sacrifice. Everyone else heard you singing, but I heard you singing and I put my own words in there.”

“Oh,” I said, though nothing was clear to me.

“It’s not what you sing, Brendon, it’s how you sing it.” This was exactly the opposite of my theory on singing, but Ryan looked like he believed in it very much. “People will listen to you if you tell them, people will just hear me if I tell them.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“You can think about,” he offered, and I thought he was about to walk away, or fall down.

“No, I will,” I blurted out. “I can sing.”

He nodded and smiled. “I know you can.”

“I’m remarkably good at singing, actually!” I exclaimed, and we tapped our bottles together to rejoice.

“Damn right,” he said.

“I could do it, easy. No problem.” My enthusiasm was short lived. Ryan looked like he was slowly sinking to his knees. “You kind of look like you need to sit down,” I pointed out.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m gonna go outside for a minute.” He went to the other side of the basement and fell asleep.

I should have said no. I spent countless subsequent hours wondering what would have happened if I had said what I knew I should have said. No, Ryan, I came to play guitar, that’s all I want to do. Those are your lyrics; you’re the one who needs to sing them. I know you don’t mean what you’re saying, I can see you’re not thinking clearly. It’s not what either of us really wants. I don’t want your permission to take your dreams from you. Neither of us will ever stop wondering what would have happened. I would never do that to you.


	3. "No."

Hold on a moment while we fast forward through time. Not too far, just far enough to weed out the unnecessary scenes from the story I am trying to tell you. We were now on the brink of a record deal. Only a few more ends remained to be tied, and then it would be done. Being in a band was far less romantic than I thought it would be. Ryan dearly wanted demos, beautiful, perfect demos, to hand out to influential people, and anything else, including playing gigs, was pushed onto the back burner. We spent a lot of time recording on shitty equipment and no time figuring out how to arrange our first show. I wondered if we could be the first band in history that were fully functional, maybe even successful, and that never play live. Ever. Spencer once took me aside during a break and told me he really wanted to play a concert, and soon, but he admitted it to me like he was confessing to a crime, and looked equally as guilty. I refused to acknowledge it was Ryan who was oppressing us. I knew we were oppressed, I knew why, but I would not blame him for it. I told Spencer we should just set something up, and bring Ryan to it without telling him ahead of time, like a surprise party. If he tried to run, we could keep dragging him back until he stayed. But a part of me wondered if someone would have to keep dragging me back with him. For months I was convinced joining their band was the worst idea I had ever had in my entire life.

If I had ever thought Ryan would be nice to me when he mentioned “helping” me learn his lyrics, I was sadly mistaken. He was nice the first time around, but if I didn’t force every word to come out exactly like he heard it in his mind, all hell would slowly and surely break loose. He pushed me farther than I ever knew I would be willing to go, and it took all my strength and patience not to scream at him when he spent all day chastising me for not being good enough. Half of the time I felt like I was yelling rather than singing, that I would sound on tape like I was being strangled. And he would never stop raising his hands in the air obnoxiously while we recorded, which was my signal to sing louder. ‘Louder, louder, louder,” Ryan’s hands would never stop insisting.

His excuse was the narrator. “Brendon, the narrator of the song would sing this louder, stronger, more confidently, better. Brendon, how many times do I have to tell you to whisper that part? Brendon, why aren’t you louder? Brendon, the narrator would not sing it like that. Brendon, do you even have any idea what the song is about? It’s a story and you’re ruining it!”

I took to addressing Ryan as Ernest Hemmingway for all his narrator and story bullshit, then invented a new language in my mind in which “Ernest Hemmingway” translated into English as “Miserable Whining Asshole who Never Shuts the Fuck Up.” My use of expletives increased dramatically when I joined the band. But I knew, somewhere deep inside of me, that I did not want to pick fights with Ryan. I would not rise to his level of agitation, because he was not agitated with me, he just wanted me to be better, and I should take it as a compliment. Besides, I felt guilty every time he asked me if I had any idea what the songs meant; I knew more about him than he was aware of, Brent had told me. Ryan’s songs hadn't come quite as far out of left field as I had originally assumed. I knew, even if it was the very last thing he would ever admit to, that Ryan was the narrator, and Ryan was being so pushy about it because he wanted me to sing for him. Ryan wanted to be louder, but Ryan was too scared to be loud, so I had to do it for him. Not only had I stolen his dream, I had been wrongly born with the voice that should have belonged to him. It was an impossible task, to sing on his behalf, but I refused to stop trying. It made me feel better just to bite my tongue and let him explode at me and smile and reply, “anything you say, Ernest Hemmingway.”

I was in the band for two weeks before Ryan would let me look at the lyrics. We were on summer break, and so could easily meet up in the public park in our neighborhood on a Tuesday afternoon. I asked if I should bring anything with me, and he told me not to. He brought with him a worn out notebook that he preferred to look at the battered corners of than to look at me. We sat on top of a picnic table, our feet on the bench of it, and I waited for him to hand it over. “I don’t usually…” he said quietly, and stopped himself. “I mean, I never… I just don’t want you to laugh at them, you know.”

His inner turmoil was adorable. I tried to make him feel better. “As long as they aren't anything like: ‘My soul is black/My parents don’t understand me/Oh baby, repeat times three’, we’ll be all right.”

He laughed, but he still wouldn’t look at me. “Do you even know what I’m going to school for?”

“I’ve heard rumors".

“Then have a little faith, Brendon,” he smiled at his shoes, and then squinted in my direction. “I don’t think we spend enough time together.”

I leaned against my knees and took off my sunglasses. I pushed them onto his face, carefully avoiding violently poking out his eyes, and said quite honestly, “I don’t think so either.” Okay, I told myself, that was fucking dashing as hell. But I kept a set face, and decided to congratulate myself on it later.

He snorted one last bit of laughter, adjusted my sunglasses, took a deep breath, and finally said, “Fine.”

I then held in my hands Ryan Ross’ most precious possession. It was his entire heart and soul in eighty pages. I really, really hoped it didn't suck.

He gave me about thirty seconds to process it all, which was not nearly enough. Everything I was looking at had stopped my brain from processing it; I was trying to figure out what every line meant and how I was going to sing it all at the same time. They didn’t look like lyrics, it didn’t rhyme, it had no pattern, there was no hope to try and decipher it. He was talking but I didn’t hear him, I just continued to read. There were ellipses and parentheses and filler words, quotation marks and question marks and exclamation points, and generally more things I couldn’t physically sing than anything I could.

“- Only two right now, but that notebook is full of ideas for more, it’s just things I think of and then later I can put them together to music but we haven’t gotten around to it yet…”

“Shh,” I told him. What the fuck was I supposed to do with this? I felt like my pulse was going to keep decelerating until it totally stopped, I felt like breathing and blinking were not really necessary anymore. Everything slowed down, everything got quieter, I felt the pressure of a million pounds on my shoulders. Was he going to expect me to know what it meant? Was I a bad person for not already knowing what it meant? Half of it was scratched out until it was illegible; sometimes bits that were scratched out were circled again and rescued from becoming trash with the word “keep” atop them. It all seemed to be about hospitals and clothes, and I didn’t see even one mention of a girl. I would overanalyze that when I had more time.

“- And this page here,” he turned a page over for me, “I hate this one, it’s all…” he shuddered, like everything written on it disgusted him, and then ripped it from the notebook and crumpled up. “Ignore that page.”

“Shh,” I said again, and pushed his hands away from me. I was concentrating. He finally stopped explaining and apologizing and left me to read, fidgeting quietly next to me. He rolled his sleeves up, rolled them back down, and rolled them back up again. He took my sunglasses off and inspected them and put them back on. He turned around and watched little kids swing and slide. He leaned over my shoulder and read along with me. He opened his mouth, and I said “Shh!” He walked laps around our table. He found a stick and started scratching pictures into the dirt. He retied his shoes.

“All right,” I said loudly when I was done reading through the entire thing. He joined me back on the table and looked at me intently, anxious to know my opinion. “It’s possible you’re a genius,” I said.

He laughed. “I don’t know about that.”

“But,” I began, and he looked like his heart just dropped out of his body and landed trampled somewhere over by the basketball court, “I don’t have any idea how to sing it.”

“Oh,” he said. “I can help you. I’ll just sing it to you quick and then you can sing it into the microphone. Then you’ll memorize it, and …” he shrugged and smiled. “It’ll be easy.”

I was not as convinced, but I said nothing. If I could have thought of anything at all to respond to him with faster than he changed the subject, there wouldn’t have been a number three on my list. But I kept my mouth shut, and that’s when Ryan, with the greatest of ease, set up another terrible thing for me to say.

“Brent says you like me,” he said.

I frowned at him. “Of course I like you.”

“I mean, he says you have a crush on me.” He paused to pick at a splinter fraying out of the table. “He says you look at me wistfully.”

A hundred thousand years passed before I could will myself to respond. “’s just how I look at people.”

He laughed in a ‘that’s sweet but completely untrue’ sort of way. “Well, if you do, I wouldn’t mind. I wouldn’t hate you or anything. So don’t worry about being nervous around me. Don’t freak out, I mean. I really want to be able to work with you.” He was still refusing to look me in the eye, still picking at the table even though there was nothing left to pick. “I didn’t think my band could ever … I don’t think we ever had so much potential, before you walked in the room.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I haven’t ever freaked out around you,” I told him. I prided myself in that fact.

“I know you haven’t, I know…” He shifted his weight. “But do you?”

“Do I what?” I hoped he was asking anything at all except what I thought he might be asking.

“Have a crush on me,” he clarified, confirming my fear. It looked like his cheeks colored under my glasses.

Every possible response ran through my head at once. I could have said yes. I could have said I didn’t know. I could have said it was highly unlikely. I could have said you wouldn’t be asking me that if you knew my parents. I could have laughed and said in his dreams. I could have punched him in the face, or burst into tears, or abruptly changed the subject, because two can play at that game. I could have said I just wanted to be friends with him, that that’s always all I had ever wanted. Any of it would have been better than, “No.” But that’s what came out.

He finally looked at me, smiled, and nodded. It reminded me of the first time I saw him, when he was laughing with the girl, and I knew he was lying before I knew who he was.


	4. “A football player in cowboy boots just tried to break your skull open with the neck of your guitar, so I carried your unconscious body twelve blocks to safety.”

When I told my parents I was going on tour with my band, they told me to leave the house. I won’t go into the details; it wasn’t my or their shining moment of love and acceptance, or even civility. We’ve since gotten over it, made up for lost time, and are now a perfectly normal family. It’s not relevant. What is relevant, however, is my first apartment. It’s worth noting I felt absolutely no homesickness on my first night alone, nor did I even once consider calling my parents and begging to be allowed to go home. I wasn’t afraid to think about the future, with just me, in the world on my own, because I never felt alone. It was probably because Ryan refused to get off of my sofa.

Ryan and Spencer had helped me move one night after I called Ryan, more or less on the verge of tears, and told him I couldn’t take it anymore. Spencer left as soon as he finished eating the pizza I had provided as a bribe, but Ryan took his soda and settled down on the sofa amongst the boxes. “Maybe we should be roommates,” he said.

“Ryan,” I told him from my spot on the floor. I was exhausted and couldn’t find the energy to stand up. “I just signed a twelve month contract.”

“But I could move in here,” he said, studying his left hand. “It would be easier for when we’re recording. We could carpool.”

“I only have one bedroom.” I didn’t know why I was arguing. If Ryan really wanted to move in with me, I would have been ecstatic.

He did not respond. Instead, in true Ryan fashion, he changed the subject. “I think I’m going to quit drinking.”

I didn’t know what to say at first. “I think that would be a good idea.”

“I don’t want to end up so bad,” he said without explaining what he meant. “And I think I’m bringing Spencer down with me. And you.”

“I’m fine…” I tried to assure him.

“You won’t stay fine,” he replied.

He fell asleep there, and ended up sleeping there every night for two weeks, until our tour began. He treated his renunciation of alcohol like he was quitting heroin, demanding that I stay with him to make sure he didn’t slip up, and to not let him out of my apartment. When I inevitably had to go to work to pay for the apartment, Spencer would take over. The night before the tour I came home weary and fatigued following a long day of part time retail, and the two of them were sitting at my dining room table, looking at me like they had something very serious to tell me. They both decided to quit school. I did not know if it was equally as good idea as quitting alcohol was, but I said nothing about it. I was in no position to tell them what sorts of personal sacrifices to make or not to make for the sake of the band. It was theirs before it was mine.

Our first show was at a bar called Aqua. It had a marine theme. The room backstage was painted sea foam green with glaring dark orange fish, making it look like a nursery. Or a nursery from hell. Ryan was so nervous that he said the only solution was to have a drink. We told him not to, that we wouldn’t allow it, because the Ryan of two days ago would have wanted us to say that. But then he became hostile and threatened to go back home if we didn’t let him do what he wanted to do. We came to a compromise ten minutes before we were set to go on stage: he could have one drink. He ordered one drink, and then he disappeared out of the room. I suspected he went outside to drink it, not wanting to drink it in front of us.

I didn't think he would show his face again before it was absolutely necessary, but I had my own problems to deal with. Normally, this was never supposed to happen, this show business thing. I was in it for Ryan, Ryan was supposed to keep me locked up somewhere, protecting his secrets and adamantly disallowing me to tell strangers the words he had written in his notebooks. The only hope I had left was that he would run away and we would be forced to cancel the show. But he didn't run away, he came back. He found me in the restroom, quietly falling apart at the seams.

I was standing at the sinks in front of the mirror. He walked up behind me and gave me a sort of hug that involved his covering my eyes with his hands. He didn't say a word, just rested his cheek on the back of my neck, and left me with nothing to see and nothing to hear and nothing to feel but him.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I think," he began slowly, "most of the time, you're holding yourself back. You're not really you."

I kept quiet.

"You had too many rules to follow when you were a kid, but you're not a kid anymore, and you don't know what to do." He paused. "I'm hypnotizing you."

I knew he didn't want me to laugh, so I did not laugh. "Hypnotizing me?" I repeated.

"The old Brendon died thirty seconds ago, and right now, no Brendon exists. When I take my hands away and you see yourself again, you'll see the real you. The real you is not reserved, the real you is not afraid. Especially of people. The real you is afraid of people least of all. Nothing they say and nothing they do can affect the real you. You're going to be loud and funny and fearless and bold, and say what's on your mind. You're going to be open minded and loving and see the good in everybody. And if the real you ever falters, the real you has a best friend in the real me."

"Who is the real you?" I asked him.

He took a moment to respond. "I don't know," he said, and dropped his hands.

I looked into my own eyes. The last time I stared at myself in the mirror and told myself I could be perfect band material, I turned out to be right. And Ryan was right, too. I didn't have to have stage fright. No one watching me could be any better at what I was doing than I was. I looked at Ryan, and he was looking at me.

"You're supposed to be looking at the real you," he said.

"I am," I told him. I stared at him a moment longer, to make sure he got the point, and then I grabbed his wrist and walked us out of the room. There was suddenly no chance in hell I would let either one of us run away from that stage.

We opened for someone who opened for someone who opened for someone who opened for someone, and even they weren’t such a spectacular talent. After Ryan’s incredibly somber pep talk I felt a lot less nervous to go out there, and what little shreds of fear still hung in my stomach I determinedly hid, for Ryan’s sake. I envied every other actual musician when, at best, four people applauded us from the audience as we walked out, because actual musicians at least had sound checks. We had something; whether or not it could technically be referred to as a sound check was another thing. I didn’t have the time to develop an on stage personae during our sound check, I’d only had the time to count to three and sing one line.

We played five songs. Three of them had only been thrown together within the previous week, and none of them had definitive titles. In fact, none of them had any definitive anything – the lyrics, the melody, the bass lines, the beats, which parts were the chorus and which parts were not, was in a constant state of flux. The looks on the faces of the few people who were actually paying attention to us mimicked what I assumed my face looked like when I first read Ryan’s lyrics, except four times stronger. I did not blame them. The band they had come to see sounded like what we would sound like if we had absolutely no ambition except to be almost as good as something that had already happened and faded away fifteen years ago.

I managed to remember all of the lyrics and not fuck up a single chord for two songs in a row, so on the third one I decided to try working on my stage presence. Spencer began to count us in but I told him to give me a minute.

“Thank you!” I kind of yelled at the audience. “We’re Panic at the Disco, and we’re twelve years old.” I waited for them to laugh. Someone coughed. “This band is a school project,” I added, quieter, and waited again. Crickets.

“They think you’re being serious,” Brent said to me a moment later, rather obviously.

I cleared my throat. “Go ahead, Spencer,” I finished.

So my subjects did not yet feel my stage presence; at least I had tried. I had to start somewhere. I thought it was a perfectly good joke. People love it when you make fun of yourself. I didn’t know it was so unapparent that we were not twelve years old. I considered thinking of jokes before our next show and writing them down and practicing them on people beforehand, but that seemed less than authentic.

I missed my first note somewhere in the middle of the third song. I had been thinking too hard on my underappreciated joke, and then sneaked a look at Ryan during the bridge. It required a bit of work to find him; he was hiding as far stage left as he possibly could get, going so far as to lean against a speaker that was placed there because it was not supposed to be part of what the audience was seeing. He had spent the whole show alternately looking like his eyes were going to pop out of his head if he looked up, and looking at his shoes, and looking at his guitar, and looking at nothing. He also seemed to be having no fun at all. But he saw me when I turned towards him. I made a face at him that was supposed to represent I had just committed social suicide and hadn’t the will to carry on, and he laughed at me. It made the next seventeen notes I missed slightly less troubling.

When it was finally over, we seemed to have won over a couple of people, a pair of young girls who didn’t look old enough to be in the place who had danced to the last song and smiled up at me a lot. I thought they would have smiled at Ryan instead, if they could have seen him. When we were done, and the last note had gone, I reached out to them and, in a dramatic showing, kissed their cheeks. It didn’t seem to be something I would have done if Ryan wasn’t right, and I hadn’t turned into a new person forty-five minutes earlier in the public restroom. I didn’t even care what anyone thought about it; at least I knew those girls would buy our record when it came out.

We walked backstage after our show single file and in a daze. Spencer went straight for the provided water bottles. Brent said, “That was fucking weird,” mostly to himself. Ryan rubbed his eyes and stretched out on the floor, face down, with his nose to the filthy carpet. “I’m freaking out,” he mumbled.

I felt like I was having a heart attack and that my body heat was several times higher than a person’s should be in order to survive. I was freaking out, too. I looked at Spencer. “Are you freaking out?” I asked him.

He shrugged mid-swig of water. “Nah,” he said, “I’m cool.” He paused. “I mean, I’m hot, it’s really hot out there, but I’m good.”

For some reason, his words broke the barrier in my heart and I had to laugh, and then let out a victorious cry that was the vocalization of all the happiness and righteousness that had built up inside of me. Then I ran at him and jumped on top of him, wrapped my arms around him and refused to let go. He struggled to hold both of us up, but found a way, and held me back. Ryan joined us next, and put one arm around me and one arm around Spencer. He buried his face in Spencer’s shoulder. Brent came over last, and together we became a conglomeration of people who had done everything in their power to make each other happy. I had never loved anyone in my entire life as much as I loved all three of them, right then, that night. I felt like my heart was going to burst even when it began to slow down. We laughed so that we didn’t cry and yelled until our lungs ran out of air and scared the shit out of some roadie of the headlining band who had the bad luck to walk past us.

It was not just love that filled me up, nor was it only accomplishment. I had finally found something to believe in; I had looked into the eyes of exactly what I wanted my life to be like, which had been missing in its entirety until then. I believed that we were the best band that night; I even believed we were the best band in the world. I wished someone had recorded our set because I didn’t feel like I could sleep again until I had turned it into CDs and gone door to door and brought the message to everyone in Las Vegas. To people I knew needed to hear it. To the whole world. Ryan’s stupid narrator even made sense to me then. Regardless of if the narrator was he, or I, or a little bit of us both, with his heart and my voice, he was telling a story that needed to be heard, and people needed to hear it. I was so happy that I even believed Ryan when he said his very favorite words: “We should celebrate.” We did need to celebrate.

We did not, however, need to celebrate until Ryan blacked out. It happened at 1:14 AM; I only knew this because we had been sitting at the bar together, watching a football game on TV on mute, tapping our toes to the tune of someone on stage who had a black soul, parents who didn’t understand him, and a girlfriend named Baby. That was the first time I had ever gotten drunk, but I was not about to admit that to anyone, either. Ryan had one arm around my waist for no apparent reason and was talking to me via screaming words directly into my right ear.

“It’s lucky this bar didn’t card us,” was one of the things he screamed. Actually, he pointed that out three different times throughout the night. I agreed; it was.

The game was the Vikings versus the Colts and we spent a long time trying to remember which state the Vikings were from. We had only gotten marginally close to the right answer when an exceptionally large man bumped hard into Ryan’s back and caused him to spill part of his drink on his pants. The man apologized in a way that made it seem like he had done it on purpose. It might have been true; I had seen him giving us the evil eye during our set. Ryan glared at him and seemed genuinely upset, and I wondered if he had actually gotten hurt and didn’t want to say anything. I pulled him back to reality by pointing out the guy’s stupid shoes. Shoes, especially bad ones, usually brought all kinds of humor to Ryan.

“Do you think he’s a football player?” Ryan asked me, and it almost became the very last thing he ever said to me. Quite abruptly, his eyes closed and he fell backwards like someone had unplugged him or flipped his switch into the off position. I caught him before he broke his neck, and yelled at Spencer and Brent to come help me.

“What are we supposed to do!?” I screamed at them frantically. This was not the sort of thing that happened to Todd and I when we played checkers on my parent’s kitchen table on Saturday nights.

“Wake him up,” answered Brent brilliantly. Spencer took him from me and shook his shoulders so that his head lolled from side to side.

“He wasn’t even very drunk,” I yelled. “I mean, don’t you have to be speaking a nonexistent language or foaming at the mouth or something before this happens?” No one answered me. Brent started slapping him, and Spencer was yelling “Ryan!” at him. “Maybe it wasn’t the alcohol, maybe he has a brain hemorrhage!” I ventured, terrified. “What if he has cancer?”

That was when I noticed the football player/pointed boots man coming back toward us. Not directly at us, but he walked in our general direction. I did not, however, notice what he was holding until he threw it at us. Unaware that my poor Ryan was probably dead, he hurled Ryan’s guitar at him, and yelled, “I think this is yours!” and then cackled an insufferable laugh. Ryan’s guitar was not in such good shape. We had left it backstage, along with all of our gear, but someone in another band had taken it from its stand and smashed it in half onstage. None of the four of us had noticed from our place at the bar.

Just in case Ryan wasn’t dead, I didn’t want him to be murdered, either, so I pulled Spencer, who pulled Ryan, who made an empty space in which the guitar was thrust and then fell pathetically to the ground. The three of us stared at it in open-mouthed shock, and then Spencer made an executive decision. “We’re leaving.”

I tried to help Spencer drag Ryan out the door. Not only was it not working fast enough, it wasn’t really working at all. Finally I decided to wrap my arms around his thighs, and hoisted him over my shoulder. As soon as I was sure I wasn’t just going to fall backwards, I stomped away, indomitable.

“Um,” said Spencer at my heels when we were outside. I assumed Brent was somewhere behind him, but I wasn’t going to look. “You… I can help you.”

“I’m fine,” I said. Ryan was a lot heavier than he looked from afar, but I would not let him go.

“I’m not going to drive us,” said Spencer. “Let me get us a cab.”

I kept walking. He walked and tried to hail at the same time. Brent trailed us.

“Are you doing all right?” Spencer asked me after three blocks.

“I lift weights,” I said.

He laughed. Oh, so that was obviously a lie.

We rode nine blocks in a taxi, and I still would not let go of Ryan. He slumped over me in my lap. “What am I supposed to do with him?” I asked Spencer.

“Just let him sleep it off,” he told me.

“It’s not like he stopped breathing,” said Brent.

I carried him up four flights of stairs to my apartment, which he was still living in, for one last night, anyway. It was the final night of his sobriety period; he had said after he played a gig without drinking, he would be free forever. I felt like it was my fault he had failed. I had to take a break when we made it to my front door, and leaned him against the wall to catch my breath. He started showing signs of life then, frowning and mumbling something at me I couldn’t understand.

I dragged him to my bed. If he had to sleep it off, he was going to sleep it off as comfortably as I could make him. I pulled his shoes off and pulled my sheets up to his chin. I was on my way to the sofa when he reached out and grabbed my hand. I turned to look at him; it was a relief to see his eyes again.

“What happened?” he whispered, his voice hoarse.

“That guy tried to kill you,” I said. We would talk about the alcohol another time.

“What?” he asked.

“That football player guy, with the cowboy boots. He threw your guitar at you. It’s broken. It almost hit you in the head.” I swallowed. “I carried you home.”

He was asleep before he could say anything else.


	5. “My thoughts on how the moon looks when I am in Vegas and you are in Europe with Spencer Smith.”

This was around the time Brent was subtracted from our lives and Jon was inserted in place of him. We had a record out, we had toured and toured and toured. We had been more places than I had previously assumed would have wanted us to be there. I had to stop kissing everyone who danced for fear of contracting a disease.

Ryan never moved in with me, and I never moved in with him. Instead, we traded keys and lived life like we each had two apartments each and would utilize whichever was nearest to us at the time. When I had made enough money from the music to quit my job, Ryan started talking about moving out and getting “something nicer, like a loft.” He was very dedicated to this idea when we weren’t in Las Vegas and he couldn’t look at anything, but when we got back, and he could actually act on his plan, he just sat on my sofa and read my books.

There was a girl at our most recent show in Los Angeles who spent our entire set making eyes at Ryan, except I thought it made her look like she was about to be ill. Somehow, she found a way to get backstage after that show and I found her wandering around aimlessly, looking for Ryan. She referred to him as ‘your guitarist.’ “Where’s your guitarist?” she had asked me. I pointed her in the direction of the doors that led outside, not because Ryan was out there, but because I wanted her to leave, but Ryan found her first. I am almost positive that night was the first time any of the four of us slept with a groupie and, four and a half weeks later, back in Vegas, I still hadn’t completely forgiven him for it. I was keen to forget her as soon as possible, but it became impossible when she knocked on my front door one day, and said she was there to pick up Ryan for their “date.”

I told her to give us a moment, and shut the door in her face. Ryan was so deeply concentrated on a book I had gotten as a gift and never laid eyes on since that it was probable he never heard anyone come to the door. “Ryan,” I addressed him and tried to get his attention.

“Yes?” he asked, turning a page over.

“Do you ever date girls who aren’t whores?”

“No,” he said easily. “But why do you ask?”

“Because one is waiting for you outside,” I explained.

He groaned and dropped the book to look at me, realization setting into his eyes. “Shit!” he yelled, and ran into my bedroom that was serving more as a wasteland for all of our clothes, and not for any functional purpose. “I forgot!”

I followed him, my arms crossed in a condescending manner. “But she’s not just any whore,” I pointed out to him while he looked for a shirt through the mountains of fabric that hopefully smelled better than the one he was wearing. “She’s some kind of fancy new whore that drives herself across state lines for another go.”

“She’s not a whore,” he mumbled. “She likes me and I like her.”

“She likes you because you have a record deal,” I corrected for him.

“She’s not like that, Brendon,” he assured me. “She’s not even a fan, she just likes music.”

I snorted. “Oh.”

He had found things to wear, pulled them out of piles and carried them in his arms to the bathroom. He shut me out, but I stood outside of the door and continued to express my disappointment. “You should live a little, stay home for once. I could rent a thousand movies and we could stay up all night. We could invite Spencer and Jon over. We could tell Jon the new guy always pays for the pizza.” He wasn’t responding to me. “Or, uh, we could sit around with coffee and have an intimate discussion about books, or whatever you like to do.”

The door opened again, and he was in the middle of rolling his eyes at me, wearing a new outfit. He turned back to the sink to brush his teeth in world record speed. “Brendon,” he said gravely through a mouth full of toothpaste. “I think I love her.”

“Really?” I asked. “Do you even know anything about her? Does she know anything about you?”

He spit and rinsed and ran toward the door. “Yes, yes, we know things about each other,” he assured. “But she’ll never know as much about me as you do, so don’t be jealous.” He kissed my cheek and I knew he only did it because he thought I wanted him to. I glared at him. “Don’t expect me back, I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said.

“Don’t patronize me,” I told him, feeling livid.

He sighed dramatically. “I’m not, Jesus. I’m trying to help you!”

I shook my head. “Help me what?”

“To not be miserable?” he offered.

“She looks like a toilet seat,” I said.

We glared at each other for a moment, and then he laughed. “I’ll see you later.” He even had the nerve to ruffle my hair before he disappeared out the door.

I watched them walk, hand in hand, down the stairs and to his car. “It’s Ryan Ross!” I yelled at the back of her head, but they weren’t paying any attention to me.

My empty apartment felt even emptier after that, so I called Spencer and asked him what he was doing.

“Packing,” he said.

I took a moment to process this. “Are you running away from home?” I asked.

He laughed. “Nope, going to Italy. Didn’t Ryan tell you?”

“Apparently not,” I said and collapsed onto the sofa. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Ryan had decided to move to Venice with Spencer and his toilet seat lover to live in a constant state of ménage à trois, and he didn’t tell me on purpose, because he thought I had the emotional handle of a five year old.

“We’re going for a couple of days, we’ll be back for next tour, so don’t worry,” said Spencer.

I shook my head. “I’m not worried.”

“We’ve been planning it for a long time. Why didn’t he tell you that?” Spencer wondered. I wondered, too. “Anyway, I have to get going. I-“

“All right,” I said, and hung up on him. I stretched every limb out and let the phone fall to the floor. It sounded like it broke into a million pieces, but I was not particularly worried about that, either. I felt lethargic and numb and couldn’t be bothered to do anything except, perhaps an hour later, turn on the television. Even then I could scarcely process what was happening on the screen. I decided I needed more friends outside of my band, because everyone inside of my band was a psychopath. Or maybe it was just me. Or maybe it was none of us, but just because they thought I was, it turned me into a faux psychopath.

I thought about calling Jon next. I really liked Jon, and he hadn’t been around quite long enough to find a reason to hate me, yet. I desperately craved to have a conversation that had little or nothing to do with Ryan, or how Ryan was treating me, or where Ryan was going, or what Ryan was doing. I would have loved to talk to Jon for hours about his cats or what kind of lawn treatment he used, but before I could make myself get off the sofa to find and repair the phone, I fell asleep.

It was a dreamless and short-lived sleep. When I woke up I not only felt like shit, emotionally, I had somehow also acquired a headache and a stomachache, and, for whatever reason, my ears hurt. I only woke up because I heard what seemed like a warehouse of pots and pans crashing from several feet above to the floor next to my head.

“Shit,” said Ryan, and more metal on metal noises occurred. I groaned and stuffed my face into a cushion. “Okay…” he added, tripping over only one more thing, and then he landed on my feet. “What happened?”

I peaked at him with one heavy lidded eye. “When?”

“Tonight, when I left.”

I thought about it. “Nothing?”

“Then what the fuck?” he whined, and his cell phone appeared in his hand from out of nowhere and he handed it to me. “What is this supposed to mean?”

I looked at the screen. It was a text message from Spencer to Ryan, which read: “Damage control: B knows about Rome.”

I sighed, exasperated, and dropped his phone somewhere next to mine. Soon we would have a mountain of phones to match our mountain range of clothes. “I forgot to mention Spencer told me you’re going to Italy and I destroyed half the city in my jealous rage.”

Ryan gave me a look, unsure of how serious I was being.

“I took a nap,” I said. “You woke me up. The end. Goodnight. Go back to your girlfriend.” I hid my face again and waved him away with a hand.

He ignored me. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to get mad.”

“So just drop off of the face of the earth one day without a word of warning and I’ll feel much better when I think you’re dead in a gutter somewhere,” I said into my cushion.

“Well, I was going to call you when I got there…” he paused. “I know it was a bad idea. I bet you wouldn’t have gotten mad at me anyway.”

I grunted something, half asleep.

“I don’t think you would get jealous, that’s not why I didn’t tell you. I just... I’m jealous for you.”

“Oh, God,” I whispered. I was not in the mood for some kind of existential heart to heart at two in the morning.

“You know what I mean?” he asked me.

“No,” I shot back.

“I feel terrible for you when I do things with Spencer, and I feel terrible for Spencer when I do things with you. If Jon starts considering me his best friend I’ll probably have to move and change my identity because I wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

“You’re not a fourteen year old girl, Ryan, we’re not going to kick you out of our clique,” I said.

“I mean, if you and Spencer decided to go to Italy together and were leaving me behind, I’d hate you both. But we didn’t invite you because … it’s just something we’ve wanted to do since we were little, and we couldn’t afford it before now.”

“If you would have told me exactly that before now, I would have done anything but hate you.”

“I know,” he said sympathetically. “And now you probably think I didn’t tell you because I don’t consider you good enough to need to know, like I never thought about telling you because you’re so unimportant.”

“I didn’t think that, actually, but thank you, I do now.”

There was a moment of silence, and then the sound of shuffling and resituating, and then he was squeezing himself between me and the back of the sofa, not giving me any option except to give him enough room to fit there.

He was practically nose-to-nose with me, and he put his arm around my waist. “What are you doing?” I asked him, annoyed. I hoped his date wasn’t standing outside of the front door, waiting for him to get done placating me, ruffling my hair or whatever made him think made me happy and made up for the fact he would never fall in love with me. Oh, God, I closed my eyes for a moment, I did not really just think that.

“Hypnotizing you,” he smiled at me.

I tried to ask about the girl. I was going to ask him if he thought we should let her indoors and maybe feed her, she looked like she needed it, but he stopped every one of my thoughts when he started inching closer and closer to me, so slowly I felt like I was having an out of body experience and watching it from somewhere else in slow motion. I had several thousand too many reservations left about the reasons why Ryan Ross would kiss me to actually enjoy our first kiss on any deep level, but, superficially, it was the best and most long-awaited kiss of my entire life. I was still the first one to pull away. “Don’t kiss me just because you think I want you to,” I told him.

“What makes you think I am?” he replied, still smiling at me that weird smile that I had never seen on his face before.

I wondered if he was playing an April Fools joke on me, but it was September, or if I was on a hidden camera reality show somehow, and someone was going to pop out from the pantry and tell me I won a thousand dollars for being so blissfully naïve, and thus, entertaining to the masses. Maybe about thirty people would pop out, including all of my friends and family, and laugh and hug me and pat my back and say “of course Ryan doesn’t want to kiss you, you poor thing, what were you thinking?”

Before anyone had the chance to throw confetti and reveal the cameras, I kissed him back. Mine was just a small kiss, but I wanted to tell him all at once, without words, that I wanted to kiss him forever, but that I was still incredulous of the circumstances. What had I done that night that made me so much more kissable than any other of the billion moments we had spent together? And would I ever get to do it again? I wrapped both of my arms around him and held him against me for the rest of the night. When I woke up, of course, he was gone, and a note was on my forehead. “In Italy,” it said, with a smiley face underneath.

I started looking at the moon a lot while he was gone. He was gone three nights, and he only called me once during. “It’s so nice to be somewhere so beautiful with your best friend,” he had told me, and it was the first time I had ever felt jealous of Spencer, ever. Neither one of us mentioned the kiss. While he was gone I thought it would be too weird to talk about over the phone and when he got back, I knew it would be too weird to talk about face to face, so it faded away, and we fell back into our old patterns. It was much easier that way.

He wrote me a postcard while he was there, which I didn’t receive in the mail until well after he was back. It was a simple thing, and didn’t say much of anything, but I liked it so much that I got it into my head that I would write him a postcard back. I waited until we were on tour and picked a random city. My random city ended up being Quebec, and I found a postcard for it at a gas station we stopped at in the middle of the night. I wrote to him that the moon looks very different when he is on another continent and in a completely different time zone, and far away from me. I mailed it to his apartment in Vegas from Pittsburgh, after a show we played there. He never told me whether he received it or not.


	6. The time I said nothing, part one.

This one was simple. We were working in some foreign country, jetlagged beyond comprehension, living on coffee and not much else. We were beginning to forget what beds looked like. It was the middle of the day, perhaps around lunchtime, and we were waiting to go on live television. We had about thirty minutes of waiting to do. There was food being offered down the hall from our dressing room but I was so hungry that I wasn’t hungry anymore, so I stayed behind. Spencer and Jon went to eat. Ryan said he was going outside to make a phone call.

It was the first time peace and quiet had fallen on my ears in days, the first time I had been alone in weeks. I went so far as to let my eyes fall closed, but that’s when Ryan stormed back in, stomping his feet hard on the tile of the floor with each step. He grabbed one of the overstuffed armchairs in the room that was supposed to make us feel comforted and like we were at home, and dragged it so that it faced the wall, with just enough room for his legs to fit. I thought about leaving him alone; that’s what I knew he probably wanted the most. But my inquisitive nature and constant worry over him refused to rest, so I pulled a chair next to his. He had his arms crossed and looked very unhappy, but was hiding it well.

I didn’t say anything, I didn’t ask him the obvious, if he was okay. I just sat next to him, trying to be there for him. I crossed my arms like his were, and put my feet up on the wall, shoes and all. He gave me a sidelong glance and put his feet up too, and gave me a little smile when we matched.

“Do you ever think about us?” he asked me eventually. “Like, what if we really did end up together?”

He didn’t give me enough time to answer, but I didn’t want to anyway.

“I do,” he continued. “I daydream sometimes that we become Brendon and Ryan, like the Brendon and Ryan we’re supposed to be. We could get a mansion somewhere, or a nice apartment in the city, and tell your parents we’re roommates who have really serious problems meeting girls. It would be so easy.”

I don’t know why I didn’t say anything, except that I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of a single thing to tell him. I almost told him I would love to do that, to live with him, to lie for him, that I wanted to take care of him and protect him and make sure he was always happy. But he already knew all of that, and I couldn’t make myself repeat it and sound pathetic. I didn’t want him to laugh at me.

Someone walked by the room and asked if I was there. “Brendon?” they called. I thought it might have been Jon, but they sounded a million miles away and I couldn’t focus on their voice.

Ryan was still looking at me, and I was looking at him. “But it would never work,” he whispered, almost inaudibly. “I could never do that.”

Whoever was in the hall gave up and walked away. I tried to ask Ryan why not, why it wouldn't work, with my eyes. I was worried if I opened my mouth my heart and soul would come out and whatever I babbled he would never forgive me for.

“Because I wouldn’t have you anymore,” he answered the question I never asked.

Someone else walked past, and stuck their head in the open door frame. This time it was Spencer. “Brendon, do you know where Ryan…” he stopped, noticing the room was deceptively empty. “Brendon?” he asked. “Ryan? Anybody?”

Ryan turned his head and looked at his shoes on the wall. I blinked. We hid there until Spencer was gone.


	7. “A denouement.”

“Brendon, look. I can’t… I have been thinking about these songs all fucking day, since we last spoke, actually, and I just can’t… I can’t see them working out. I think I need your stupid reassurance, so call me back. Bye. Wait. Not that I’m trying to say you’re stupid, or the things you say are stupid, or-“

“Brendon, the thing cut me off last time and I was going to just let it go but it’s been two hours and you still haven’t called back. I just called Spencer, who is all the way in Vegas, you know, and made him do that thing you did with your hands on the table with his girlfriend’s soup ladle and ice cream scooper. It sounds like shit. Answer your phone.”

“Brendon, why did you even write these lyrics? Are you making fun of who I think you’re making fun of? How can we possibly sing this together? Do you want everyone we know to hate us? Am I overanalyzing this? I don’t have any idea what I’m doing. I don’t know how to read other people’s lyrics. And when did you write them? Where was I?”

“Brendon, this band is totally incapable of producing a second record. It’s just… that’s just what I’ve decided. It’s obvious. I just tried to write something completely new, and it sounded like ‘But It’s Better If We Do.’ I mean, exactly like that. Exactly… like that.”

“Brendon, I’m not doing this anymore. This is official. I’m calling Spence and Jon in a minute. It’s over. We’re breaking up. Goodbye.”

“Brendon, just to clarify, I meant the band.”

Something came out of me that was a combination of a sigh and a laugh and I shook my head while I dialed Ryan’s phone number.

“Brendon?” he answered, sounding like a terrified child who desperately sought comfort.

“Ryan,” I replied calmly. “Are you doing all right?”

“Where are you?” he demanded. “Why haven’t you picked up your phone?”

“L.A., and because I was busy,” I said diplomatically.

“I’m in New York,” he said unnecessarily, because I knew that. “Are you with that guy?”

“Um,” I said.

“Brendon!” he yelled at me, and I realized he had perhaps fallen farther from his usual sanity and composure than I had originally thought. He never yelled.

“What?” I yelled back, but quieter, because I was having lunch at an outdoor café and was amongst the public. “You’re the one who’s practically married.”

“It’s just wildly unprofessional of you,” he said, and sounded as though he really believed himself. “If you’re going to be hanging out with guys, you need to hang out with us.”

“If I was within a hundred mile radius of any of you, I promise I would.”

He scoffed. “I do not remember agreeing to this … vacation. I haven’t seen any of you in ages. We can’t work this way.”

“That’s the point,” I told him, and stuffed a forkful of salad into my mouth.

“I’m not going to make an entire record with you through email and voice messages. I’d rather fucking not, thank you very much.”

I rolled my eyes. “Then don’t, I thought we were breaking up anyway.”

“We are,” he said. “I already called them. They, unlike you, make an attempt to stay in contact with me.”

“And what did they have to say about our band’s untimely demise?” I asked.

He hesitated. “They laughed.”

“And I thought I would be the only one.”

“I told them to go on without me if they wanted to. Keep the band and just replace me. I can’t do it anymore.”

“We have always talked about how much better we would be without you…” I said.

“Shut the fuck up,” he spat.

I stopped eating. “Ryan, do you want me to come visit you?”

“No,” he answered immediately. “I’m finished. It’s over. All we had was one record in us. We were undeservedly bigger than we ever thought we could be, and now it’s fading, and soon it will be a distant memory. Music is moving on without us. We’re victims in its wake.”

“A denouement,” I mused. “So what’s the verdict?”

“Spencer is a metaphorical drummer in life. He is the constant beat that keeps the rest of us on the right path, and is always there to save us with stability and familiarity. Jon takes away everything negative in our lives and replaces it with goodness, with friendship and positivism. You’re the voice; you learned you could sing your way into or out of anything you might ever want. You learned that something beautiful is inside of you.”

I smiled. “And you?”

“I’m the fuckup who nearly ruined all of your lives, and I managed to escape death’s clutches by the skin of my teeth. Now I have to spend forever unable to write anything, ever again, and all I can do is sit at home and think about what I’ve done, like a child who broke a rule and was sent to time out. Time out for the rest of my life.”

I bit into a breadstick and when I spoke again it was with my mouth full, and crumbs flew from my lips, dreadfully impolite. “Maybe we should go to the mountains.”

"Why would we go to the mountains?"


	8. The time I said nothing, part two.

The first show of our first tour after our second record was released felt like the first show of my entire life, all over again. We had played shows here and there, in between actual tours, and people had heard the new songs, but it was never so well groomed and packaged up as nicely as it was that night. I was nervous for doing things I had done before, that people had seen, but that were rusty from disuse. I was nervous for my band mates, and I was worried they were nervous for me.

The differences between that show and our real first show were significant. The sound check was legitimate, all the songs had titles, everything about them was definitive, we were headlining, and pretty much everyone in the audience was there to see us. Ryan was vaguely more visible and was even so bold as to walk towards the center of the stage a few times. He sang. Jon was there, which meant more to us than he would probably ever know. We were older, we had seen more, lived through more. We weren’t quite as enchanted about acquiring one or two new fans; it was sad, but it didn’t matter as much anymore. Different things mattered. I could drink on stage. I was still trying to figure out how to work with someone who had kissed me, and how to hold onto all three of them as some of my closest friends when it was unavoidable that tour would end; that the work would end at some point after that.

I hadn’t been on a tour bus in what seemed like years, but it had really been nowhere near that long. I wasn’t used to the feeling of trying to live and have fun and rest your body and mind while constantly in motion. Even a week into that tour, I still felt disconnected from the three of them. We all seemed to be wrapped up in our own worlds, always on the phone with or instant messaging someone who was immediate in our thoughts but far away from our physical selves. It felt like none of us cared either way whether the rest of us were there or not.

On our way out of Colorado I was up to seven sentences on my list, and I was feeling restless. I didn’t want to talk to people far away; I wanted some actual human interaction. I wandered around the bus, looking for someone to bother. I knocked on the miniscule piece of wood next to Spencer’s bunk, because his curtain was closed. He opened it and stuck his head out, his phone to his ear.

“Busy?” I asked him.

“No…” he said politely, because he obviously was.

“I’m just bored, never mind,” I said, and began to walk away.

“I’ll be out in just a minute,” he promised, and shut the curtain again.

I waited for him for a while, standing awkwardly with nothing to do in the little hallway that separated our beds. I heard both Spencer and Ryan’s voices, from different directions, and tried not to eavesdrop on either of them, allowing their words and their laughter to meld into one, indecipherable sound. Spencer never came out. I sighed, and continued down the hall. Ryan’s curtain wasn’t closed, but he was on the phone, too, and laughing into it even more than Spencer was. I didn’t have the heart to disrupt whatever was happening that was making him so happy.

Jon was making food in the lounge. I wasn’t hungry at all, but I was so bored that my stomach told me I was anyway, a reaction to whatever was steaming off of Jon’s plate. “What’s up, kid?” he asked me.

“I’m so bored!” I said, and dramatically dropped to my knees to beg at his feet. “Entertain me! Before I die!”

He sucked something that appeared to be ketchup off of his thumb. “Let’s watch a movie,” he offered to me, and I clapped my hands in accordance and chose a comfortable seat. “It’s movie time!” he yelled down the hallway.

“Just a minute!” said Spencer.

“No, thanks,” said Ryan.

I shook my head at Jon and whispered to him, “They’re boring as fuck.”

“Get your asses out here now,” Jon demanded. “Movie time is not up for discussion, it’s mandatory.”

There was no response.

Jon sighed. “Mandatory movie time!” he nearly screamed. To my mild surprise, the two of them shuffled out a minute later, looking sullen.

Spencer sat at my feet, and Jon and Ryan sat on the sofa across from us. Jon picked the movie, which I had very little interest in. All I had wanted was for us to do something together, and this was a perfect thing to do. We all laughed at the same lines, we made fun of the way the actors looked, we paused it when some woman showed her breasts and again when a man looked like he had a booger hanging from his nose. Ryan pointed out it had won an Academy Award for Best Drama one year. “It is very dramatic,” Spencer replied seriously, with a piece of mozzarella cheese stuck to the inside of one of his nostrils.

The film, being the epic masterpiece as it was, ran over three hours, and toward the end of it I began to feel sleepy. I hugged my knees to my chest and rested my cheek against them, pretending to be asleep in a curled up ball, but really just looking at Ryan. At some point, Jon threw something at him, which made him turn his head and laugh, and he caught me looking at him. I was unapologetic about it, and merely smiled at him because he was smiling. Then I mouthed something to him, careful not to let a single syllable be heard by anyone.

He laughed again and looked at me, confused. He mouthed, “What?” back at me, because we were suddenly having a private conversation in the midst of public company.

I rolled my eyes, because it was obvious what I had said, without saying anything at all. “I love you,” I repeated, loud enough for everyone to hear.

He laughed, obviously embarrassed by my being so bold and awkward. He looked at Spencer, and he looked at Jon, and neither of them had paid any attention to what I said. I told people I loved them all of the time, and it wasn’t any shock that I loved Ryan. It was only Ryan who was taking it so seriously, acting as though I had said instead, “I’ve fallen madly in love with you,” which is a different thing to say entirely. I knew he had made this assumption, however, because only he could see my eyes. My eyes were certainly saying “I’ve fallen madly in love with you,” in a way my voice quite professionally hid.

He shook his head, still amused by Jon or me or both of us. “I love you, too, Brendon,” he said.

I rolled my eyes and peeked above my knees to watch the movie again. He was so bad at handling me. Or us. Or it, whatever it was. I adored how bad he was at handling it. That was when the tire blew out.

I took my computer, cigarettes, a royal blue Bic lighter, and my one sheet of paper, my list of things I have said to Ryan that might have made him hate me, and I added number eight: “The Time I Said Nothing, Part Two.” It happened only a minute before the bus fiasco, before I trudged up the hill with my most dear possessions. My hill was not very high, but below I could see Spencer and Ryan, already on their phones, complaining about what had happened, and a large number of our crew trying to fix the problem. I lit a cigarette, and then I lit the list on fire, without thinking about it twice. The bright light in the middle of the night, well above his head, caught the attention of Ryan. He squinted up at me while I watched it burn and spark and slowly fade out. I supposed all he could see was my silhouette before my fire; a boy all alone with a light on a hill.


End file.
